Grousing By Insiders Cooked Duck's Goose

July 4, 1987|By Jay Boyar, Sentinel Movie critic

While most Americans will spend this day celebrating our country's birthday, I'll be meditating about another anniversary. It was one year ago this month that the hype for a movie called Howard the Duck began exploding like fireworks.

By all the usual measures, Howard the Duck was a failure. The film, a sci-fi comedy about a talking duck from a distant planet who's unexpectedly transported to earth, lost a lot of money and got a lot of bad reviews. But it succeeded in another way: Howard the Duck quickly became one of the most infamous films in history.

A year has gone by and people are still quacking about it -- especially people in the media. In fact, Howard the Duck has become more than merely a movie. It is a symbol, a symbol of something that Hollywood hates about itself.

Most movie critics weren't particularly kind to the film, but the critics didn't kill it. Howard was a dead duck before the first review appeared. Hollywood killed Howard the Duck -- the industry insiders, the gossips and the gossip columnists, the system.

To them, this George Lucas production wasn't just another bad summer movie, like Haunted Honeymoon or Under the Cherry Moon. To the film industry, Howard the Duck represented the essence of the shallow, big-budgeted, heavily promoted special-effects movie.

This sort of picture has made big profits for many in the movie world but it has also stirred a lot of resentment. People who have trouble getting more serious projects financed can't help disliking a film like Howard the Duck.

The badmouthing of this movie wasn't so much a case of Hollywood killing the duck that laid the golden egg as it was of Hollywood getting everyone to agree in advance that the egg was rotten. The hype for Howard may have been loud, but the horrible advance word was even louder.

Why was Howard the Duck singled out for extermination rather than, say, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Return of the Jedi or Ghostbusters? Howard the Duck wasn't a masterpiece, but there was nothing so very objectionable about it. In my humble opinion, it was sort of cute, in a goofy, adolescent sort of way.

Part of the answer is simply that the time had come for Hollywood to strike back against the special-effects movie. Another important factor was that Howard was more vulnerable than a lot of other movies in its genre. For one thing, large sections of it had to be reshot, which gave the Hollywood gang something to pick at right off the bat. For another, it could not be defended as virtuoso filmmaking as, say, The Empire Strikes Back can. And it didn't have the commercial protection of being a sequel to a popular movie or having stars in its cast.

The title was also a problem. Duck is one of those words that people instinctively laugh at, and the vaguely woeful sound of the name Howard just accentuated the joke. The fact that the silliness of the title is intentional -- the film, after all, is a comedy -- didn't matter to people who wanted to hate Howard the Duck. Most of them never saw it, anyway.

This sort of ganging up on a movie happens every so often in Hollywood. It happened to the entertaining remake of King Kong (1976). Most recently, it happened to the amusing Ishtar, a case of Hollywood rebelling against the big- star movie rather than the special-effects movie.

I'm not ready to call for a Howard the Duck revival: That would be completely daffy and, besides, it just doesn't matter enough. But can we at least put a moratorium on castigating the movie? And, also, as you're watching the fireworks tonight, take just a moment to remember Howard -- and all of Hollywood's scapeducks.